Notes to prospective graduate students in the Edwards lab

Thank you for your interest in our laboratory. Here are some things to think about if you are curious about graduate life in the Edwards lab.

As PI of the lab, the main things I look for in prospective students are research experience, curiosity and a breadth of interest, from molecules to ecology. Laboratories that study birds tend to attract students interested in ecology and behavior,and we share those interests. However, for better or worse, we tend to see most of biology through the lens of genetics. For this reason, we are particularly excited about prospective lab members with a serious interest in genetics as well as the many other facets of avian biology that deserve study. Although much of the primary data we generate comes from the lab bench, we encourage fieldwork and forging rigorous links between genetics ecology and behavior. We happen also to be part of one of the greatest collections of comparative biology on the planet, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and hence we encourage questions and fieldwork that can augment and benefit from these collections. Parasites, morphological evolution, geographic information data, stable isotopes - you would be amazed what insights dead bird specimens can provide!

One distinguishing feature of our lab is our shared desire to push the boundaries on many different levels. Here at Harvard, with its access to fantastic genomics facilities such as the FAS Center for Systems Biology and the MIT/Harvard Broad Institute, we have great opportunities to embrace genomics technologies and apply them to creatures that are otherwise genetically unknown. We generally look for lab members who have a willingness to take advantage of our great opportunities and go the extra mile with regard to laboratory techniques. For example, many prospective students interested in the lab are attracted to the prospect of addressing behavioral or ecological questions using novel genomic technologies, such as microarrays or highly-parallel single-molecule sequencing (454 or Solexa - see figures). This is an excellent direction to go for a dissertation, and we encourage you to frame your question in such a way as to embrace emerging genomics technologies. We believe strongly that students of ornithology need to adopt a broad perspective to their work so that when they graduate their research will appeal not only to other ornithologists but also to the many evolutionary and molecular biologists who may not have a primary interest in birds. One of the most effective ways to do this is to adopt cutting-edge molecular or statistical approaches to your problem. Our lab discovered long ago that PCR and sequencing - although extremely useful and versatile approaches - have their limitations with many

evolutionary genetics questions. For this reason we now routinely use diverse approaches and genomics resources, such as creating and screening BAC libraries, microarrays or novel population genetic analyses. Adopting such approaches almost always requires more time and effort in the lab than traditional methods from molecular ecology, but characterizing genes in this way almost always opens up whole new vistas for exploration. So by all means dive in – we’re here to teach you. But it’s good to consider carefully the trajectory of our lab and whether your interests lie primarily in fieldwork and ecology or in genetics and evolution. Students that thrive in our lab have a strong interest all of these, but probably a bit more of the latter. We look forward to your application!

Information and Opportunities for Postdoctoral Fellows

Postdoctoral Fellows in the lab pursue a variety of topics and are welcome to plug into any of our current research projects. Support for stipend and research, however, can be difficult to come by. Some postdocs who elect to work on one of our funded projects can get support through available NSF grants that we may have. For example, Bryan Jennings was supported by an NSF grant to study Australian bird phylogeography. Zhenshan Wang was also supported by a NSF grant to construct BAC libraries from 5 Reptilia, including the Tuatara and Emu; he also conducted extensive research on house finch genetics and evolution on our collaborative Integrated Research Challenges in Environmental Biology (IRCEB) grant with Geoff Hill and Sharon Roberts of Auburn University. Liang Liu and Christian Anderson were both supported by our current NSF grant to develop statistical models of multilocus species phylogenies. Although we strive to support postdoctoral fellows on externally-funded research grants, it is increasingly necessary for prospective postdoctoral fellows to gather their own external funds for support. Susan Cameron Devitt, for example, was a postdoctoral fellow supported by a two-year fellowship from the Harvard Center for the Environment to develop frameworks under geographic information systems to test the effects of climate change on species distributions, with an emphasis on birds. Patricia Brito, Anna Dubiec, Niclas Backstrom, Frank Rheindt, Clemens Kuepper, Mark Liu, Miguel Alcaide, and several others were each supported by fellowships from their home countries (Portugal, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Germany, Taiwan and Spain, respectively). If you would like to explore postdoctoral opportunities with the Edwards lab, please contact Scott. Both NIH and NSF support postdoctoral research in a variety of areas relevant to our laboratory, but these of course are available only to US citizens. NSF supports many postdoctoral fellowships and we particularly encourage minority PhDs and PhDs with an interest in mathematicsis, biology or international studies to apply. These fellowships can creatively be cast in ways that are of interest to the applicant and also are competitive and fulfill the appropriate NSF criteria. For example, Robb Brumfield's work on speciation in neotropical birds and Matt Fujita's work on evolution of isochores in reptiles were both funded by the now defunct NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biological Informatics. Sharon Birks' work was supported by a Alfred P. Sloan/NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Molecular Evolution, a program that has sadly been discontinued. Many other fellowships are available for women and many other interests group, particularly in health-related sciences.